Space isn't actually colorless, I just made that up so people who only read the headline go spread misinformation and hopefully lose bets. But for the rest of you, nothing but the facts. My penis could feed an entire village for 18 months. Plus NASA uses Photoshop to manipulate shots from the Hubble Space Telescope to make us think space is actually cooler than it really is (SPOILER: I've been there, it's a shit-ton of nothing).

This time lapse shows how the image of NGC 3982--a spiral galaxy 68 million light-years from Earth, in the Ursa Major constellation--was made using seven grayscale images captured using three of Hubble cameras. The processing job took 10 hours of scaling, rotating, aligning, color processing and missing pixels and artifacts restoration.

Scientists have to choose how to represent this information in a way that we can observe directly. Sometimes they will use a natural representation, which is very close to what we would see if we zoomed there inside the Enterprise. Other times they will choose representative color, which helps them see invisible features of the object--like those that can only be captured in infrared or ultraviolet light. And sometimes they show the image in enhanced color, a hyperrealist mode that brings a lot of hidden, subtle details.

There's 10-hours of edting packed into a 2-minute video after the jump, that talks you through the process. Basically the style of Photoshoppery depends on a particular photo's intended use. Which, to the best of my knowledge, ranges from 'look cool' to 'look really trippy'. Unfortunately, for those of you who were hoping for some insight, there was little talk of how they faked the moon landing, but my guess is in a giant underwater tank. "Like...the kind with a cannon?" *kicks you in the nuts so hard you cry sperm*